Boxee Hooks Up With Facebook To Make Live TV Social

Boxee will give you the ability to share what you're watching straight to Facebook with a new expansion of the integration of the service into its software. Those of you with the Live TV dongle attached to your Boxee Boxes will be able to share without leaving the TV program.

I managed to catch a glimpse of it at Showstoppers at CES 2012 and thought that it was pretty cool. It's definitely the way that things need to go in my book because I don't always want a second screen when I'm watching but I do like to share what it is I've got my eyeballs on (I use GetGlue because they offer free stickers and I'm a sucker for stickers).

Social TV From Boxee & Facebook

Via Open Graph, users will be able to auto-share what they're watching. You can also see how many of your Facebook friends are watching a show right in the program guide. They say that when it launches you'll see profile pics of friends from Facebook instead of just now many.

If you've got Boxee and Facebook you can click shared links on Facebook to the show page and put into your queue to watch later or just add to favorites.

Watching a show for more than two minutes will see it then auto-share and you're able to opt out of the auto-sharing altogether. I don't really share everything I watch, just some of the more interesting things because I think it would get annoying to know what everyone is watching all of the time and it would just flood the news feeds. Personally I think there should be no auto-share and you should have to choose yes or no to share your viewing of a program, especially if you're watching those adult how-to films on demand or something, right?

There's a broad line between social TV and too much information but apparently Boxee didn't think about that in this case. I think that after two minutes the software should ask if you want to share this. Plus, what happens when you have a family using the same TV? Is there going to be a menu that lets you choose which person is watching and then share to that profile? It seems they've still got some work to do.

The company is still getting a lot of flak for dumping their non-hardware-based software options in what, to users, seems just a way to make money by selling boxes instead of supporting the users who supported them for so long. It definitely seems to be that Boxee will become just another connected device in a sea of similar options and they're even doing similar things to what the others are doing. A far cry from when they were in a class of product that really only had a handful of worthy competitors.

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